Month: July 2010

How do you expect to be taken serious, if you do not keep you appointments? How will you get people to trust that you can deliver a service if you cannot even manage a phone meeting?

It definitely affects your credibility if you cannot make your appointments. Every man and woman can of natural causes be delayed or in any case be prevented from showing up. In deal focused countries like northern Europe and northern USA it would be normal to make a call to apologizing for the delay, or to be polite and cancel the meeting as soon as it comes to your attention. In this case the costumer is in general sympathetic and is ready to schedule a new appointment. But what happens if you do not cancel you meeting and leave your costumer in the lurch?

“Remember to share on Facebook”

The costumers will most likely feel disappointed and the possibility that the costumer will be willing to schedule a new meeting with you is certainly limited. However not mission impossible, but your trustworthiness has suffered big time.

For the past days I have been working on a new phone solution for a small business. In that situation I have called around to talk with the relevant suppliers of such a solution. With one of the companies that I talked to, I scheduled an appointment for a consulting phone call the next day. I was looking very much forward to the call, but never received it. In that situation the suppliers’ trustworthiness breached, and I am not sure if I would feel secure giving them the order, if they cannot even manage to make a consulting call.

Now is the time for you to pay attention!

The important lesson is: “Gain your costumers trust before you screw around with them.” As soon as you have built up a relationship with your costumer and have gained their trust. They will keep coming back even though you make a little mistake. Is this then a reason for treating your costumers badly?

No way! Look into the marketplace and see who remains successful – those who treat their customers with respect and keep delivering a quality service. Think about it? Why spend a lot of money winning a costumer and then afterwards dumping him or her, when you can spend a minimal amount of money on keeping them in your portfolio.

“Irony is a great tool when doing business across cultures!” Or not. – Example of Irony.

Who would know it was Irony, if I had not said it? Probably not many. In general irony is not working when writing, because a main part of irony lies in the strictly sarcastic tone of voice. To compensate for the disability to set a tone, people try with smileys and other symbols when writing, but in general people are more or less unsuccessful. Therefor try to avoid irony when writing!

Not just is sarcasm evil when writing, it does also have certain limitations when talking. Usually you would use sarcasm among friends and they would have no problem getting the fact that you were being ironic. The problem happens when you bring you sarcastic humor at work and to your first business meeting. Acting as a salesman in a local community, irony will usually not cause you any trouble. But the day you sit in a meeting with an overseas business partner and fire up some ironic joke, you will experience the true evil of irony.

The problem is that irony or sarcasm is often different from culture to culture. It exists in every culture, but the understanding of humor can be very different. Therefore be careful when telling sarcastic jokes! Frequently ironic jokes get misunderstood and in the worth cases it ends up costing the deal. A man that has experienced on his own and has studied the concept of cross cultural business behavior is the Author and businessman Richard Gesteland. From his book “Cross-Cultural Business Behavior” you can read real life examples of clients walking out of a meeting because stupid ironic joke or a basic misunderstanding of the cultural differences.

So if you want to avoid getting in trouble, keep the irony between you and your friends. And go to work as a professional.

Try to type ”Alexander Hold” into google.com and you will find that alexanderhold.com appears as number 3 or 4 depending on who look.

The result is quite decent taking into consideration that alexanderhold.com only have been online for a short while. However it would be lovely to appear as number 1 or 2.

I have for the past months been working for a better ranking on google with different interesting SEO tools and the effort has also paid off. My position on Google has significantly improved from not appearing on page one now to be in the top on the search term “Alexander Hold” However my struggle is still the German TV judge Alexander Hold or better known as “Richter Alexander Hold”.

So how to defeat Richter Alexander Hold on Google.

I need your help by placing a link on your website/blog to: http://alexanderhold.com with the anchor text “Alexander Hold”.

I believe that you are more creative and will come up with a better text. Together we can defeat the German and send a huge German sat1 TV brand to the second position.

A little Tip: Outgoing links affect your page rank as well as incoming links. Linking to a site containing interesting articles with relevant content for your website will have a positive influence on your page rank.

Get noticed and post a comment to this article with your website from where you link to http://alexanderhold.com and put in effort to get your site noticed on the web.